Utopia

‘A New Jerusalem cannot be built without an effective sewage system,’
Miriam Eliav-Feldon wrote in Realistic Utopias (1982). Indeed, the
old Jerusalem relied in biblical times on a municipal waste-combustion
site, Gehenna, identified by Hobbes as the real-world model for hell –
where the fires would keep burning for as long as there were sinners
for incineration. In William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890),
which unearths utopia in 21st-century Hammersmith, the Houses of
Parliament have been repurposed as a store for dung, while in Utopia
itself, Thomas More specifies that Utopians use gold, which is
abundant, for chamber pots. Shit, like nothing, happens anywhere,
these utopian writers seem to say, but what matters is keeping it
localised.